The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but (...) in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a literary history of writing the colonial interregnum through the comparison of a canonical Dublin text and its filmic adaptation with a canonical Johannesburg text and its filmic adaptation. Njabulo Ndebele’s short story ‘Fools’ (1983) repurposes formal elements from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), transposing strategies for representing late colonial Dublin to a Johannesburg township during the height of apartheid in a context of extreme racial domination; beginning with close comparative readings of both stories, my chapter argues that (...) the context in which ‘Fools’ emerges determines the significance of its reappropriation of Joycean formal devices and simultaneously forces a re-reading of Joyce’s flirtation with bourgeois naturalism in ‘The Dead.’ Further, the respective publishing contexts of ‘Fools’ and ‘The Dead’ go on to determine their reception and recirculation, as demonstrated by the diverse histories of the American John Huston’s adaptation of ‘The Dead’ (1984), and Ramadan Suleman’s South African adaptation of ‘Fools’ (1997). In following this circumatlantic history of influence and adaptation from Joyce to Ndebele to Huston to Suleman, across hemispheres and media, I mean to articulate a relationship between modernist form and forms of modernity, particularly as those forms that appear and reappear in the global south over the course of the long twentieth century. Particular attention is paid here to the history of underdevelopment in the global south and how it impinges upon the production and circulation of literary adaptations. (shrink)

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how (...) mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject. (shrink)

An examination of the specifically graphic-novelistic strategies employed in Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir, Maus, in leading the reader into a punctuated experience of time and memory, and in forcing complicity with the novel's problematic animal-as-ethnicity metaphor, in a wider attempt at putting together the critical vocabulary for discussing comic books as simultaneously textual and pictorial ‘texts’.

The goal of the present volume is to discuss the notion of a 'conceptual framework' or 'conceptual scheme', which has been dominating much work in the analysis and justification of knowledge in recent years. More specifi cally, this volume is designed to clarify the contrast between two competing approaches in the area of problems indicated by this notion: On the one hand, we have the conviction, underlying much present-day work in the philosophy of science, that the best we can hope (...) for in the justifi cation of empirical knowledge is to reconstruct the conceptual means actually employed by science, and to develop suitable models for analyzing conceptual change involved in the progress of science. This view involves the assumption that we should stop taking foundational questions of epistemology seriously and discard once and for all the quest for uncontrovertible truth. The result ing program of justifying epistemic claims by subsequently describing patterns of inferentially connected concepts as they are at work in actual science is closely connected with the idea of naturalizing epistemology, with concep tual relativism, and with a pragmatic interpretation of knowledge. On the other hand, recent epistemology tends to claim that no subsequent reconstruction of actually employed conceptual frameworks is sufficient for providing epistemic justification for our beliefs about the world. This second claim tries to resist the naturalistic and pragmatic approach to epistemology and insists on taking the epistemological sceptic seriously. (shrink)

Preface to Volumes 1 and 2 Lorenz Krüger xv Introduction to Volume 1 Lorraine J. Daston 1 I Revolution 1 What Are Scientific Revolutions? Thomas S. Kuhn 7 2 Scientific Revolutions, Revolutions in Science, and a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930 I. Bernard Cohen 23 3 Was There a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930? Ian Hacking 45 II Concepts 4 The Slow Rise of Probabilism: Philosophical Arguments in the Nineteenth Century Lorenz Krüger 59 5 The Decline of the Laplacian Theory of Probability: A Study (...) of Stumpf, von Kries, and Meinong Andreas Kamlah 91 6 Fechner’s Indeterminism: From Freedom to Laws of Chance Michael Heidelberger 117 7 The Saint Petersburg Paradox 1713-1937 Gerard Jorland 157 8 Laplace and Thereafter: The Status of Probability Calculus in the Nineteenth Century Ivo Schneider 191 9 Emile Borel as a Probabilist Eberhard Knobloch 215 III Uncertainty 10 The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance 1650-1830 237 11 The Objectification of Observation: Measurement and Statistical Methods in the Nineteenth Century Zeno G. Swijtink 261 12 The Measurement of Uncertainty in Nineteenth-Century Social Science Stephen M. Stigler 287 IV Society 13 Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics Lorraine J. Daston 295 14 Decrire, Compter, Calculer: The Debate over Statistics during the Napoleonic Period Marie-Noelle Bourguet 305 15 Probability in Vital and Social Statistics: Quetelet, Farr, and the Bertillons Bernard-Pierre Lécuyer 317 16 Paupers and Numbers: The Statistical Argument for Social Reform in Britain during the Period of Industrialization Karl H. Metz 337 17 Lawless Society: Social Science and the Reinterpretation of Statistics in Germany, 1850-1880 Theodore M. Porter 351 18 Prussian Numbers 1860-1882 Ian Hacking 377 19 How Do Sums Count? On the Cultural Origins of Statistical Causality M. Norton Wise 395. (shrink)

What are the relationships between philosophy and the history of philosophy, the history of science and the philosophy of science? This selection of essays by Lorenz Krüger (1932-1994) presents exemplary studies on the philosophy of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, on the history of physics and on the scope and limitations of scientific explanation, and a realistic understanding of science and truth. In his treatment of leading currents in 20th century philosophy, Krüger presents new and original arguments for a deeper (...) understanding of the continuity and dynamics of the development of scientific theory. These result in significant consequences for the claim of the sciences that they understand reality in a rational manner. The case studies are complemented by fundamental thoughts on the relationship between philosophy, science, and their common history. (shrink)

Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman, or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans (...) to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital. (shrink)

I PSYCHOLOGY 5 The Probabilistic Revolution in Psychology--an Overview Gerd Gigerenzer 7 1 Probabilistic Thinking and the Fight against Subjectivity Gerd Gigerenzer 11 2 Statistical Method and the Historical Development of Research Practice in American Psychology Kurt Danziger 35 3 Survival of the Fittest Probabilist: Brunswik, Thurstone, and the Two Disciplines of Psychology Gerd Gigerenzer 49 4 A Perspective for Viewing the Integration of Probability Theory in Psychology David J. Murray 73 II SOCIOLOGY 101 5 The Two Empirical Roots of (...) Social Theory and the Probability Revolution Anthony Oberschall 103 III ECONOMICS 133 The Probabilistic Revolution in Economics--an Overview Mary S. Morgan 135 6 Why Was There No Probabilistic Revolution in Economic Thought? Claude Mènard 139 7 The Rise of Macroeconomic Calculations in Economic Statistics Robert A. Horváth 147 8 Statistics without Probability and Haavelmo’s Revolution in Econometrics Mary S. Morgan 171 IV PHYSIOLOGY 199 9 Experimental Physiology and Statistical Inference: The Therapeutic Trial in Nineteenth-Century Germany William Coleman 201 V EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY 227 The Probabilistic Revolution in Evolutionary Biology--an Overview John H. Beatty 229 10 Natural Selection as a Causal, Empirical, and Probabilistic Theory M. J. S. Hodge 233 11 Dobzhansky and Drift: Facts, Values, and Chance in Evolutionary Biology John H. Beatty 271 12 Random Genetic Drift, R. A. Fisher, and the Oxford School of Ecological Genetics John R. G. Turner 313 13 On the Prior Probability of the Existence of Life Bernd-Olaf Küppers 355 VI PHYSICS 371 The Probabilistic Revolution in Physics--an Overview Lorenz Krüger 373 14 Probabilistic Physics the Classical Way Jan von Plato 379 15 Max Born and the Reality of Quantum Probabilities Nancy Cartwright 409 16 Philosophical Problems of Quantum Theory: The Response of American Physicists Nancy Cartwright. (shrink)

This paper considers Achebe's No Longer at Ease in terms of its modest canonical fortunes and its peculiar formal construction. The paper argues that the novel's urban setting is produced through an emergent and local noir style, that this setting indexes the increasing centrality of the city in late colonial African life, and that it formally responds to the success of Achebe's rural Things Fall Apart and its problematic status as a paradigmatic African text. The paper suggests that No Longer (...) at Ease 's foreign and local horizons of interpretation, as symptoms of an ongoing imperial world-system, are internalized and symbolically resolved by the novel's instantiation of Lagos as chronotope. The paper's methodological intervention offers a hermeneutics of literary setting through which to elaborate the relationships between form, literary institutions, and material conditions in the postcolony. (shrink)

It is argued that the opposition of nature and ethics ought to be overcome by the cooperation of scientific and ethical studies. Beyond that, theoretical, practical and specifically political reasons suggest a serious examination of the possibilities for an ethical orientation derived from evolutionary biology. So far, however, the conceptual connexion between evolutionary facts and ethical norms appears to be insufficiently understood. Given that, suggestive connexions offered by biological thinkers need critical examination, especially of their hidden historical conditions and their (...) potentially dangerous political implications. (shrink)

It is argued that the opposition of nature and ethics ought to be overcome by the cooperation of scientific and ethical studies. Beyond that, theoretical, practical and specifically political reasons suggest a serious examination of the possibilities for an ethical orientation derived from evolutionary biology. So far, however, the conceptual connexion between evolutionary facts and ethical norms appears to be insufficiently understood. Given that, suggestive connexions offered by biological thinkers need critical examination, especially of their hidden historical conditions and their (...) potentially dangerous political implications. (shrink)

Modem science and technology tend to create one global civilization. To what extent and how can cultural pluralism be preserved under these conditions? Neither inherent limitations of natural science and technology nor alternative lines of developing them offer a promising road for pluralism. But it is to be expected that the unifying trend will not carry over into the realm of the human and social sciences; these are rather to be construed as "locally dispersed", i.e. uncapable of being developed into (...) a unified theory of human nature, whereas natural science refers to a unified picture of non-human nature. Thus, modest hopes for preserving pluralism seem to be justified. (shrink)

Modem science and technology tend to create one global civilization. To what extent and how can cultural pluralism be preserved under these conditions? Neither inherent limitations of natural science and technology nor alternative lines of developing them offer a promising road for pluralism. But it is to be expected that the unifying trend will not carry over into the realm of the human and social sciences; these are rather to be construed as "locally dispersed", i.e. uncapable of being developed into (...) a unified theory of human nature, whereas natural science refers to a unified picture of non-human nature. Thus, modest hopes for preserving pluralism seem to be justified. (shrink)

The intuitive notion of a statistical explanation has been explicated in different ways; recently it has even been claimed that there are no statistical explanations at all. In an attempt to clarify the disputed issue, the approaches adopted by Hempel, by Jeffrey, Salmon and Greeno, and by Stegmuller are analyzed critically, as far as they are concerned with the explanation of particular events. A solution of the controversy is proposed on the basis of a concept of explanation which refers essentially (...) to a causal analysis of the explanandum. The possibility of statistical explanations, then, becomes contingent upon the existence of indeterministic causation. In conclusion, therefore, a conception of causality is sketched which shows that indeterminism and causal connection are compatible, at least from an epistemological point of view, so that statistical explanation can be seen to represent a specific and possibly irreducible scientific activity. (shrink)

On the weekend of July 16–18, 2004, the city of Chicago opened its much touted and thoroughly over-budget Millennium Park along the Lake Michigan shore front. This site may merit the label “people's park” for its open access, but the presence of sponsorship brands, expensive concessions, and the ongoing efforts of fee-charging institutions to move in on the park leave the whole in precarious balance between a public space of recreation in “the city that works” and a playground of affluent (...) consumption. On a less visible site a mile to the west, on the de-industrializing periphery of the central district,…. (shrink)

This paper explores violence in intimate relationships in one low-income community in the Western Cape, South Africa. In this community most intimate relationships (including parentchild, intimate partner relationships and friendships) seem to be characterized by anger, rage and also violence. In our analysis we discuss how the concepts of shame, guilt and the compulsion to repeat can serve to illuminate the seemingly inevitable link between violence and care in this specific community. It also seems that contextual factors such as class, (...) gender and race shape not only the form violence assumes, but also to whom it is directed. While we pay attention to the material and ideological conditions that shape the lives of individual storytellers, we also focus on the ways in which violence is represented in the individual stories. (shrink)

This paper intends to explore the prospects of a realistic view of scientific explanation, according to which the objects and structures occurring in the explanation must have real referents. Theories involving probability either lose their explanatory function or become counter-examples to this view, if real referents of probabilistic notions do not exist. It is argued that such referents can be found for statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics: the overall structure of mass phenomena that renders them capable of irreversible developments and (...) equilibrium states, and the inherent propensities of elementary systems. The present lack of a theoretical connection between these two referents impedes the recognition of the reality of probability in nature. (shrink)